During my time being the maintainer of Husky a lot of people asked me where they could donate money to support¹ the work I do in the application, and every single time I replied that I do not accept money for working on one FOSS project. Most of the time people reply back, saying they will wait just in case, in the future, I change my mind. This is the reason I decided to write this.

NOTE: this is my personal take into this topic, and you are free to (not) agree with my opinion.

It is just one Android application

I am not a big contributor to the FOSS ecosystem as a whole. I may have contributed in the past with some input in an issue or a small PR changing a couple of things, but overall, I do not contribute as much as I would like to (topic for another post).

The reasons I started working on Husky were:

• a1ba already stopped working on the application when I started using Pleroma.
• I am an Android developer and I could do some work into the application to improve it.
• I finally could have a project I can actually contribute and keep it as a FOSS project.

It was, mostly, selfish reasons, to begin with, but over time I noticed that I liked doing it, so I kept at it. That is the only FOSS project I currently maintain and work (actively) in my (little) spare time.

Money (mostly) equals to expectations

I do not link the time I spend on Husky to money. I would love to be able to work full-time as a FOSS developer, and maintain 2-3 applications² that are useful to people, but the world does not work like that, and my job already takes 1/3 of my time (as it does to anyone). Not everyone is lucky.

I always felt that giving me money in exchange for working on Husky makes the person giving me money think he/she can and may tell me what to do in the application. I do not want to feel that way, because that is a job, and I work in Husky because I want to, not to earn some side money.

Getting monetary donations

I think, at this point, the reader can feel that I do not really want to get money from him/her, but if that was not enough, let me write about other things that makes me not wanting you to donate money to me.

Taxes

Spain has a very bad tax code, and you have to pay (high) taxes for everything. Stripe and PayPal, as far as I could figure out, asks you for a VAT number, which is the registered number of your company/your personal ID. For privacy reasons I will not submit any of my personal data to those services.

I do not have a company registered in Spain, and I will never have one (again, high taxes for everything).

Cryptocurrencies are not a feasible option either:

• I do not posses the means to exchange <insert here any cryptocurrency> into Euro (I am not going to send my ID [NIF in Spain] to any exchange company).
• Taxes.

Thus, accepting donations is not feasible for me at this moment.

Open Collective

I spent some time researching about Open Collective. It seemed a suitable option to receive donations. But when I set up the collective for Husky, I had to apply to a Fiscal Host.

After looking for one that could suit Husky, I found two, and I did not have the requirements in place to get them to be my Fiscal Host, thus making Open Collective another discarded option.

One of them required to have a minimum of 100 stars in the repository, like it is an important metric of some sort… *sigh*.

Ko-fi and Liberapay

Although both platforms (and I am sure, more like them) are perfect candidates for getting donations, both requires a Stripe and/or a PayPal account, therefore rendering them not suitable, as I stated above the problems with both payment processors.

How can I support Husky then?

I told to many users, over time, that I do not need the money for Husky. I already have some devices for testing and the Android emulator, and my salary is more than enough money for me (at the moment of publishing this post).

If you want to support Husky:

• Open issues at the issue tracker with as much information about the problem as possible.

  You have a template to help you with this, and if you consider the template does not have enough fields, add them.

• Help with current opened issues, as I might not be able to reproduce the issue.

• Help with crashes sending the trace via email (enable the “Crash Reporter” in “Settings”). In the future this will be replaced with some service more suitable than emails.

• Help testing the application for new developments (more about this in the future).

  I am setting up a Matrix room for this purpose, but if an issue arises from testing, it must be opened at the issue tracker linked above.

• Help translating the application.

As you can see, money is not the only way to contribute to the project. And you do not need to be a developer to do any of that stuff.

Closing down

There is enough reason to not accept donations and I think, for now, I will not accept them, because things related with money, in countries from the EU, are a mess.

I prefer to take my time and do things properly (or the best I can with my abilities), and hope Husky (or any FOSS application I maintain) is useful to you, my dear reader.